Forum:Inflection templates in the process of withdrawal

First of all, as you may see, I didn't really understand how controversial these things would be in the first place. I didn't know I was wading into the Tolkienologist version of the VI/emacs holy war debate. I find elvish.org's position on the matter personally distasteful, and I would normally be on the side of Ardalambion. I considered Ardalambion a hard source based on scientific logic. But in this circumstance (being an encyclopedia/dictionary that requires greater empiricism and common agreement), I've decided I don't want to be part of this debate. So I have agreed with Ederchil to gradually remove the embedded templates and the inflection sections altogether. There is still a place for mention of grammar, but in a much briefer way, such as in the mention of Quenya stem forms and Sindarin mutation notes, but nothing as comprehensive as inflection charts, since it appears that not everyone believes that the languages are inherently stable or can be learned in the first place.

Since it seems this did technically qualify as Neo-Eldarin, I will be keeping those things out of the wiki's main article space if I can. That does not mean I've given up on Neo-Eldarin theory, but any such edits will be purely user page projects from now on, and will not be scattered across hundreds of articles the way inflection templates have been.

I will also be working on IPA pronunciations now and then. Pronunciation rules are far less controversial, it seems, so that shouldn't be a big deal.

As far as I'm aware, I've finished removing every Quenya and Sindarin inflection template from the normal article space. I will now unhide the inflection templates. I will not mark them for deletion, because I don't know what usefulness they may someday have that I can't foresee. But for now, I'm not placing them in the normal article space unless they are absolutely relevant in a fan linguistics context.

I have considered maybe starting stub articles for fan linguistics, since while not canon, they have attested usage in the fan community in sometimes high-profile ways (particularly in the Peter Jackson films, which was a very expensive piece of fanart), so completely uncanonical sentences like "Havo dad, Legolas" are notable in some form on the subject. But clearly, fan linguistics articles must be marked as fanon or other suitable non-canon label, with a clear explanation of why they are non-canon and providing at least some details on this apparently long-running debate over fan linguistics. If topics like Neo-Quenya and Neo-Sindarin are mentioned in other articles, they should probably be mentioned as "uncanonical Neo-Quenya" or "uncanonical Neo-Sindarin", etc. The lengths to which people and studios have gone to homogenize, synthesize and publish these fan linguistics are remarkable and a worthy fansphere study, I'd say. I'm not talking about every random small-time fanfiction that's ever been written—I'm talking about the big fish. David Salo is notable. Ardalambion is notable. Hiswelókë is notable. Etc. As far as I know, many of these already have articles. I don't think it would be inappropriate to detail some of their more popular ideas in separate non-canon-topic articles without endorsing them as if they were canon or fact. It's interesting. - Gilgamesh 05:23, 21 February 2010 (UTC)